“This study was pivotal in persuading senior executives that a significant group of managers were not looking for high prices and ASP-driven profits from new medicines. It changed the way we looked at contracting.”

“As a single study, this did not feel inexpensive. However, it provided excellent value compared to the cost of executing separate studies to achieve all these goals. It also provided superb and clear guidance on the major challenges that faced us.”

“RG+A built an air-tight case for a price 2-3 times what we anticipated, and then sold it all the way up to our Board of Directors. Even those who disagreed most violently agreed later that the recommendation was right.”

High-stakes decisions require better answers and stronger guidance, but budgets are crunched, timelines keep contracting, and client side researchers find themselves with more to do and less support.

RG+A knows the importance of getting the right results quickly and cost-effectively, and then providing guidance on how to convert these results into commercial action.

Marketing Insight for Commercial Intelligence

Core Expertise

Healthcare Industry Forecasting

Whether you are evaluating an acquisition, predicting the success of a new indication, or estimating the potential of a new market, RG+A’s innovative healthcare industry forecasting methods are designed to provide you with reliable insights – even in the face of uncertainty. With flexible tools such as RG+A’s pioneering Dynamic Practice Simulation®, you can have confidence in the outcome, no matter what the circumstances.

Strategic Risk Modeling

To help our clients truly understand the impact an event or system will have on their franchises and markets, RG+A has developed a standardized set of impact models reflecting market flows and conditions that affect different disease categories and market structures. Each model is designed to incorporate results of any of our core research methods, along with other forms of primary or secondary research.

Market Access

In recent years, market access has grown in power and become increasingly complex in structure. With health systems and managed care organizations continuing pressure to control the cost of patient care as well as the greater emphasis on value-based outcomes, healthcare manufacturers must navigate a challenging landscape of obstacles in order to ensure that their products are made available to patients and reimbursed in as many markets as possible.

Small Sample Research

RG+A has sample design methods and estimating processes designed specifically to meet the challenges associated with small sample sizes.

PV Scope

PV Scope enables you to explore an important patient, provider, or prescriber issue quickly and in tremendous depth. This small sample method begins with a set of telephone depth interviews that provide an initial sense of individuals' knowledge, beliefs, and actions. From there, participants engage in a multi-stage web exercise designed to determine issues on which respondents agree and others on which opinions vary. It ends with an estimating exercise that provides inputs for forecasts and probability models.

Qualitative Conjoint

Qualitative Conjoint enables our clients to conduct trade-off exercises even when the available sample is not sufficient for quantitative research. Statistical techniques such as bootstrapping increase the precision of the conjoint estimates, and such a study even enables our clients to identify segments within the sample.

Qualitative-to-Modeling® (QTM®)

QTM is a modeling tool that provides support for pivotal decisions when time, budget, or available sample are in short supply. In QTM, we build Monte Carlo forecast models by integrating your previous primary marketing research with secondary data and RG+A-run qualitative interviews. The resulting model's greatest value lies in the ability to predict probably of achieving a market share, revenue, or financial goal. It also identifies the market factors that will be most pivotal in whether you achieve goal or not, and a number to use in a spot forecast.

Payer Tools

Health Payer Insights (HPI)

Sometimes it is critical to know how payers will feel about an event or topic – fast. Our HPI methodology leverages the Health Payer Council to collect qualitative reactions to a stimulus (profile, article, question, etc.) from 20+ Pharmacy and Medical Directors in two weeks or less.

Contract Simulation®

Contract Simulation provides a realistic and intricate look at how clients will negotiate a contract for your product. The core of this method is a multi-day simulation of the actual negotiation process, with RG+A playing the role of client-side negotiator while simultaneously moderating the process. A conjoint at the back end of negotiations provides a model you can use in estimating the impact of contracting decisions. Clients have used this method with payers, hospitals, and practice managers considering buy-and-bill products.

Payer Scope

Payer Scope utilizes HPC to explore an important payer issue quickly and in tremendous depth. This small sample method begins with a set of telephone depth interviews that provide an initial sense of individuals' knowledge, beliefs, and actions. From there, participants engage in a multi-stage web exercise designed to determine issues on which respondents agree and others on which opinions vary. It ends with an estimating exercise that provides inputs for forecasts and probability models.

Modeling Support

Consumer Cascade

Consumer Cascade is a series of quantitative questions that capture every pivotal decision a patient makes during the course of therapy from the initial decision to seek treatment to the final purchase of a more expensive branded medication that the prescriber has recommended over the generic. Given the increasing importance of the consumer in the prescribing and fulfillment processes, Consumer Cascade is a pivotal element in building future-focused market models.

DPS®/Conjoint

DPS®/conjoint combines the behavioral realism and analytical power of DPS® with conjoint's ability to measure the relative impact of different variables and performance levels on market behavior. This tool is particularly useful in designing late-stage clinical trials and forecasting share and revenue for products or indications that have yet to come to market.

Dynamic Practice Simulation® (DPS®)

Dynamic Practice Simulation® is the most lifelike Marketing Research prescribing simulation available in healthcare today. DPS® creates “real” patient profiles from as many as 20 different variables, which empowers you to observe treatment choices for a diverse patient population. Physicians "prescribe" on a realistic ERx tool, which enables you to test the impact of real-time adjudication and changes in formulary status on prescribing behavior.

Cutting Edge Methods

Co-creation

Co-creation is an increasingly common way to enroll multiple stakeholders in building solutions to complex issues.
At RG+A, we have added the wrinkle of bringing anonymized Managed Markets stakeholders into collaboration with several different corporate stakeholders (commercial, regulatory, HEOR, medical) with executives in Managed Markets organizations. Clients use this method to address complex methods, or to help groups that do not usually interact with payers to see the world through this customer class's point of view.

Qualitative Conjoint

Qualitative Conjoint enables our clients to conduct trade-off exercises even when the available sample is not sufficient for quantitative research. Statistical techniques such as bootstrapping increase the precision of the conjoint estimates, and such a study even enables our clients to identify segments within the sample.

Dynamic Practice Simulation® (DPS®)

Dynamic Practice Simulation® is the most lifelike Marketing Research prescribing simulation available in healthcare today. DPS® creates “real” patient profiles from as many as 20 different variables, which empowers you to observe treatment choices for a diverse patient population. Physicians "prescribe" on a realistic ERx tool, which enables you to test the impact of real-time adjudication and changes in formulary status on prescribing behavior.

RG+A designed Health Payer Council® to address the joint challenges of sample and accuracy.

HPC® is an exclusive, proprietary Marketing Research On-Line Community comprised of Medical and Pharmacy Directors from over 100 Managed Markets organizations across the country. Members are decision makers, with 90% sitting on P&T, Medical Benefits and/or technical assessment committees. Each member is double-anonymous; neither you nor other HPC members know fostering an environment of transparency and veracity.